New Mexico Mercury

There’s something particularly ugly about the proposed new uranium mine on Mount Taylor west of Albuquerque. If past history is any indication, it will leave this sacred site littered with mining debris and contaminated water. And it will probably sell the uranium to China and India, the biggest uranium markets in the world, ruining a local place to make some people an international fortune. This will truly amount to ill gotten gains.

The companies who own the Roca Honda mine on Mount Taylor are not American companies. One is Canadian, Strathmore Minerals Corp; the other is Japanese, Sumitomo Corp. They have absolutely no incentive to clean up the left- overs of an estimated nine years of operations. And certainly have no feelings for the religious potency that the Mount Taylor region has for Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and Hopi Pueblos, and the Navajo Nation.

The companies are colonizing a portion of the mountain to make money, not to make friends.

Besides, the United States has no need for a new uranium source. We’re brimming over with the stuff and its by-products.  There’s no need to mine for national security reasons, or for national energy reasons, as was explained in a recent Mercury interview with Paul Robinson, international uranium expert and research director at the Southwest Research and Information Center.

In fact there’s no other reason to sink one or two massive mine shafts on 2,000 acres of land except to make money, perhaps in the billions of dollars, for two foreign corporations and a few folks who don’t live here but are happy to get very rich by despoiling the land of people who do live here. The taxes and “jobs” created by the mine won’t come close to compensating for the mess, and worse, for the sense of violation and government betrayal that will be left behind, along with roads that could be used by other mining companies for more extractive work in the future.

Most of the mining area will be within a legal and protective precinct known as the Mount Taylor Traditional Cultural Property. And even the Forest Service, who has final approval of the mine, says it will do “irreparable harm” to certain archaeological sites and religious uses.

Delicate and often rare medicinal plants are harvested on the mountain and many shrines bless the landscape in subtle and often invisible ways to all but Pueblo and Navajo people. Bulldozing roads through the area has been likened to putting a subdivision in the Vatican.

Corporations have no sense of the sacred. They are amoral financial entities. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court may believe in the legal fiction of corporate personhood, they have no conscience, no guilt, no sense of shame, no sense of honor or dignity. They exist to make money, any way they can, including cutting every corner they can get away with.

When Pueblo and Navajo people tell us Mount Taylor is a sacred place to them, we must believe them. When they tell us they have already suffered terribly from uranium mining in the past – with cancers and untold other health problems – we know they are telling the truth. The historical evidence is undeniable.

To allow a new, unnecessary, uranium mine to be dug over the religious objections of tribal people is shameful beyond words on the face of it. To gloss over the impact of the mine, with all its attendant roads and machinery, and probably millions of tons of ore and debris, not to mention the some 10 million gallon of groundwater a day it will take to extract the stuff, is unpardonable.

The United States, for the foreseeable future, is winding down its reliance on nuclear power plants, many of which are too old for anything but mothballing. Just last week, Southern California Edison announced it was “retiring” one of its two nuclear power plants in California, San Onofre outside of San Diego. Recycling and reprocessing spent fuel and nuclear weapons-grade materials for commercial use is a common practice in this country that has given us a surplus of useful nuclear byproducts.

Ignoring Pueblo and Navajo objections to the Roca Hondo – particularly for the enrichment of foreign corporations and their investors - is a reprehensible act of disrespect.

There’s no reason for the Roca Honda mine and no reason for a slap in the face of the people of Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and Hopi Pueblos, and the people of the Navajo nation.